welcome to tilde.clubwe're still figuring it out as we go. whoamicurrently on this same internet:
projectsnot much to report yet, but let's make a list, starting with netnews, gopher, and some way to write this all in markdown.
$RUN *USERDIRECTORY
colophonmade with vim and mosh and screen and github, so far, and a little tiny bit of javascript that doesn't work under lynx so I'll be replacing that with something server side. |
weblog 2014 October# 26 October 2014The ingredient of the week is garlic. See tilde.food+drink for the response. Thanks ~kake for the effort. An idle comment in IRC led to the discovery that ~jonathan and I both have family ties to Spread Eagle, WI via Iron Mountain, MI and Ishpeming, MI and Norway, MI. Which just goes to show you that there are more bears than Jews in the U.P. # 24 October 2014Musings with Bryan Alexander about the propriety or impropriety of tweeting at a conference. What happens when you discover that your expectations are different from the event organizers? Back from travels, inbox bailed out, working down the list of projects in my github issues repo that I keep as a personal issue tracker, generally getting things done. Thinking about how easy or hard it would be to take puppet-tilde and use it to build a tilde server on a Raspberry Pi. # 18 October 2014Off to Los Angeles on 19 October 2014 for a few days with a project. Will try to keep a tilde window open, but chances are good I'll be pestering people for project interviews. Thinking about simple command line tools for complex stats analysis, and how nice it would be to have a little community of people using R to help that out. Thinking about simple command line tools to process complex maps, and landed on the combination of `jq` and GeoJSON. More detail at my GeoJSON page. Setting up a suitable public_gopher and gophermap on tilde.land. Your client will need to support gopher to see that set of pages. Thinking hard about putting something useful there - tilde.land is gopher-only and very fast, so if I have access to crontab there I should be able to crank out a simple gopher server updated all the time. # 17 October 2014progress on all fronts, we have here. and people are rediscovering the productivty of shell, especially when you are not alone in shell but when you can share and learn from other people nearby. the next set of tools I'd like to level up on is docker, which was described as "chroot on steroids". imaging a next phase when a new tilde is set up just by launching a docker instance that mounts some shared file systems and then is ready for logins. virtualization at one more layer. another next thing is org-mode either for vim or for emacs. the Usenet news reader `tin` has been installed, and there was much rejoicing. # 16 October 2014the newsgroup tilde.ascii is fun, worth a visit. especially good is ~skk writing about concrétisme. see what I did there? that's a news: url, which provides a reference to a unique item on the net indexed into a news spool. that assumes that somehow you have news reading rights somewhere. (gotta experiment with that some more, I know lynx supports news: urls but I don't know about Chrome. Also, using port forwarding like so:
Host tilde.club
User emv
LocalForward 6667 irc:6667
LocalForward 9119 news.tilde.club:119
you can run a netnews client like Unison on your local Mac, and have it pull its news reading via NNTP through this forwarded port 9119. It makes it look like you have a news machine on your desktop even though of course you don't. # 15 October 2014Just updated my usenet page with details of new newsgroups like tilde.projects and tilde.food+drink. Slowly but surely (well, actually, quickly but surely) the pieces are coming together. It's remarkable how productive you can be on a system that doesn't have very much in the way of email. I'm amused that strn, the news reader of choice on tilde.club, really doesn't want to show you anything other than brand new news. It's time to find some simple code to browse NNTP in interesting ways. lynx has a browser, which might end up being quite useful too. # 14 October 2014Usenet news is up, at least a little bit. We'll start with a tiny number of groups and grow from there, to the extent that growth is possible. It's pretty much a complete reboot of netnews; don't think we'll be carrying any foreign groups at least for the start. Thank goodness tilde.club does not depend on modems, because if it did, they would be all busy all the time and users would be calling the phone support line to clamor for more. I get eerie flashbacks from this system. In 1991-1995 I was one of the cofounders of MSEN, a public access internet system with way too many modems in a basement of a house in a residential area. We floundered around, some of us hacking on web services like Gopher and WAIS, others of us struggling to keep an accounting system going. It was an experience that ruined me forever for sales. I still think to this day that if you have something great that you'll have people ringing your phone off the hook ready to buy it. MSEN taught me a lot about systems, but as a startup, it was not a huge success. On the other hand, that company is still going, can't tell you if it's going strong or not, I don't talk much to the cofounder who ended up buying the rest of us out when we hit crunch time in 1995. This operatic fragment preserves my memories of the system quite well, written by a certain J. Francis McLuggage. Il Internetto, a fragment of an unfinished work by Giuseppe VerdeLONG-LOST OPERATIC FRAGMENT COMES TO LIGHTDuring the golden years of the Opera in Michigan, many of the great composers and librettists wandered through the glittering capital of the Midwestern risorgimento. Strangely, little of their output has been preserved, but recently, this fragment of the libretto from an unfinished work by the immortal Giuseppe Verde came to light, hidden behind a huge nude painting at the Odd Town Tavern. Wood-Charles is proud to bring to the music community even this crumbling shard of Verde's never-performed Il Internetto. Curtain rises. It is night. A storm is gathering over the battlements of a crumbling red brick office building. In the background, the houses and lights of a fair but troubled city, An'Arbro. We hear the rumbling of distant thunder. Enter Edmundo. He leans on the crenalations and contemplates the approaching storm. Edmundo: Solo mio, vendro unscrupuloso, custombres sansaclu. (I am all alone, my vendors are of questionable ethics, and my customers are idiots.) La Traciata (off): Edmundo! Edmundo! Edmundo: Che? (What?) La Traciata (entering): Doloroso executivo, executivo perdu, pite', pite', au secours, le boite de multiplexico delenda est. (Oh, pitious executive, help, help, the modem is broke.) Small boy (dashing across the stage): Providitore connection, imbecilico! (Ameritech, idiots!) (Off) sound of a news server crashing; alarms and excursions. Don Miguele (entering): Si mentate io, periculoso meo! (If I had a brain, I'd be dangerous!) El Zastrow (drawing a baguette from beneath her chemise): Prends ca, compteur de legumes suburbanitico! Mangez le pain de ma tante! (Take that, yuppie bean counter! Eat flaming starch!) Enter four horsemen, Edmundo, Esteban, Owen Glynmorange, and Tim the Irascible. They begin to sing an old Provencal round consisting of four or five conflicting business plans. La Traciata: Ai, yi yi yi yi yi, carriage de corrosion, mi corizon non di Finisterre. Reimburse' mi. (Alas, my car is a rusting heap of junk and I cannot afford clothing from Land's End. Sure would be nice to get paid.) Lindhilde (dressed as the Kouros of Berners-Lee): Luftpost der Webdamen! Toten der Lapinnet, Toten der Lapinnet! Der krieg sind Deutchenyowlen: zu viel und laut! Wer is mein petroleum? (The flight of the web ladies! Kill the wabbitnet, kill the wabbitnet! War is like German opera: too long and too loud! Where is that damn gas tank?) Chorus of the busy signals: Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz. Night falls. The slain are born away to Valhalla or Ypsilanti. Edmundo enters dressed as a virtual transaction. As the curtain falls, he sings the plaintive and moving aria, "Yo Dudo Actuario," (I should have gone into insurance.) CURTAIN# 13 October 2014Establishing the daily tilde.club writing ritual, which mostly seems to involve documenting a few details of what has gone on recently and then also cleaning up yesterday's log for publishing on my main website, called Vacuum. I know that I want permalinks here, but I'm not willing to write a whole complex system just to have that. So the next best thing to a permalink is a link to a copy of the relevant bits of the page offsite in my "Vacuum" blog. This gives me ample incentive to edit, as well; the process gives me some sleep before the page goes into a permanent spot. I like writing in "vim", and the colorization of HTML that it does is really helpful and cheerful and reduces the number of easy mistakes that can be made. And I also like writing in a place where people can see my work as it's happening and maybe make their own comments on it or at least take note of it. Blogging appears to have devolved those two roles; I get more comments on Twitter than I do directly on the blog, so it's not that people aren't reading things, it's that they comment where they are happiest to be seen when they do make commentary. I think the strategy that will work the best is to rotate this blog monthly, make a copy of my index.html file as index-yyyymmdd.html, and link that appropriately. I also think the other strategy of making a subdirectory for every project, and linking to various things in it, might also work. Still figuring out exactly which projects! But based on a post from ~megnut I suspect that recipes should be a good place to start, and I'll start with Nana's Beer Stew. # 12 October 2014Open up a vim window that has been there all night because of mosh, start typing. It's a new day at the tilde.club. The next major ancient subsystem I'd like to get back is usenet news. tin, trn, rn etc I all have a lot of muscle memory for, and by running netnews inside a closed network of other tildes you have some hope of scaling the whole thing without needing to bust out into the swamp of the wild, wild Internet of netnews. There's no gcc or cc here now, so it seems, so I can't just compile tin; but here's tin, ready to be compiled when you are. And it does compile on my MacBook, just with "brew install tin", so that's good. I signed up for eternal-september to get an account that I can read netnews with. (ah, gcc is restricted to wizards). The eventual command line ends up being tin -q -A -g news.eternal-september.org Usenet appears to be a vast cesspool, but I think that's just a matter of not taking feeds from a lot of places and being ready to start new newsgroups that have limited distribution. I want to pick up on some of the de.* groups so I can brush up on my German again. Once upon I time I had an NNTP feed to fu-berlin. The other major subsystem to reclaim is gopher. for your 1993 listening pleasure, I give you a boombox. I love the idea of tildeclub, but I am glad to be a user and not a sysadmin there. (been there, done that.) # 11 October 2014fun with source code control, so you don't lose any text. fun with server-side includes, learning about the Meta refresh hack, and the XBitHack. I'm using screen to manage multiple shells on the same terminal. it seems to work nicely under mosh. In the process of doing so I managed to strand a bunch of mosh shells, which I'm going to clean up. ~sippey is writing about time travel. We're at the permalinks stage of weblog development, but I haven't sorted out just quite yet how to make that work perfectly if/when I end up moving this date's post off the front page. Or maybe I just type here indefinitely; or maybe I post this also somewhere else, just to have a backup. I'm logged in to tilde.club on my Android device using JuiceSSH. JuiceSSH has a nice keyboard for doing special characters, and it supports both mosh and ssh for access. I'm logged in to tilde.club using the mosh shell. |
This design is based on my first weblog, so it's kind of rough, and it uses tables, and it's very, very plain. But I miss the weblogs of 1999 and am happy to be back at it. It's very nice to share a shell prompt with the likes of ~jessamyn and ~sippey and ~pb .
